The Effect Of Customer Complain Treatment On Customer Loyalty

In the recent years, due to the boom of service industries, customer retention becomes more important. Customers are the real source of corporate profit, not products or brand. Corporation core strategy should cultivate the customer loyalty.The loyal customer is able to buy more commodities and services from corporation (Reichheld, 1996); the high degree of loyal customer also shows higher resistance to competitor's products and services (Dick and Basu, 1994); the high degree of loyal customer can accept a premium more. In fact, compared to the new one, the loyal customer pays higher in most industries (Reichheld 1996); The loyal customer brings new business often by recommending to potential customers and other customers (Reichheld, 1996; Reichheld and Sasser, 1990; Zeithaml et al., 1996); Therefore, the loyal customer is the source of the value and profit and also is the basis of gaining profit and continuing growing. (Reichheld, 1996);When the loyalty becomes the important competitive advantage of service industry gradually, the study on customer loyalty becomes more important. But most researches on the relationship of customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, the research on the effect of customer complain handling on customer loyalty is relatively less.The research adopts the classification of Davidow and Dacin: Keep silent, no longer buying (boycott) ;complain in private (negative public praise);directly complain to corporation(claims);complaining to others .Compared to other three complaints, complain to corporation is the active manifestation of customer complains, because it contains a great deal of valuable information.Customer's complaint is the good opportunity of winning customer loyalty again. We should regard complain as trust and expect rather than verbosity and fault-finding. Customer complains are the valuable information. Therefore, the customers who complain are Friends rather than enemies. Although complains make people uncomfortable, but corporation must take serious of handling customer complains because they are key issues to the corporation.We know loyalty is not a single dimensionality concept; it includes cognitive loyalty, affective loyalty, intentional loyalty and behavioral loyalty. Customer complaint treatment is showed by outcome justice, process justice and interaction justice. So if we want to know the importance of customer complaint to customer loyalty, we must know the connection of customer complaint with customer loyalty, furthermore with each factor in customer loyalty.After the demonstration research on China Mobile Group HaiKou CO.LTD, I collect 280 questionnaires.By doing statistics analysis, the conclusion as follows:1. Complaint treatment affects cognitive loyalty prominently;2. Good complaint treatment will make customer attach corporation in sensibility, like corporation's service and enjoy corporation, that is, complaint treatment affects emotional loyalty very prominently;3. After analyzing data, I find complaint treatment affect intentional loyalty positively.4. Complaint treatment also affects behavioral loyalty prominently.This research demonstrates the importance of customer complaint treatment to customer satisfaction and loyalty .This result is also important to corporation improving service, existence and development. But customer complaint treatment in many Chinese service corporations is still in the germination stage, corporation culture of attaching important to and encouraging customer complain has not been built up. There is no separate department to treat customer complaint.With customers'consume consciousness becoming mature more and more, customer complaint is a problem that can't be neglected by corporation. It can help corporation understand customer, discover its own lack and win customer loyalty finally.